IBM is Goliath. x86 is David. ARM is David's annoying little brother, angry at not being in the spot-light, and insisting he can do everything better than David....
I'm voting for x86. It's the only architecture with two suppliers (no, Via doesn't count), and has continued to advance consistently for decades. It's only very recently that it has pushed mainframes off their pedestal thanks to clustering and virtualization technologies, and only in the past few months has it started making waves at the very high end, with (just a few) RAS features FINALLY being integrated.
ARM is all hype, playing fast and loose with specs to pretend they're competitive anywhere else outside their niche. Frankly, I'd say they have more money than they know what to do with, and are trying longshot after longshot to fight back against x86, as it starts impeding on their market.
You probably meant to say "US Congress" because it sure as hell isn't Mozilla, Xiph, or FSF who insists that nobody in US is allowed to implement H.264 without first asking for permission.
Who says you should be allowed to implement technologies that were UNDENIABLY developed by others, at great expense? H.264 is most certainly not patent troll territory.
You've got one of the most powerful governments in the world telling programmers what they're allowed and not allowed to implement.
Frankly, it's ridiculous that outside of the US, you can implement all the patented technologies you want in your software, UNTIL your software gets flashed into the firmware of a device... THEN you have to pay... That is why complaining about software patents is ridiculous.
If you want to say software patents are too broad, and need to be redefined, that's just fine, but H.264 will undeniably remain as some of the most solidly legitimate patents no matter how far you go, short of abolishing them all together.
It you want to say all patents should be abolished, fine. At least that would be an honest and logically consistent position. However, I think you'll find an overwhelming amount of opposition from people who believe that individuals should be allowed to benefit from non-obvious inventions they come up with, even if they don't have the money to commercialize them personally.
Of course none of this changes anything I've said. H.264 would be a good option for video on the web, only a tiny minority vehemently oppose it for absolutely baseless and irrational reasons, and that tiny minority is thereby the single biggest force propping-up the proprietary Adobe Flash monopoly, which happens to hurt that same tiny minority (and the public at large) vastly more than the patents on H.264 ever could.
So, the dominant players want to force a patented technology into an open standard such as the web, when perfectly good free alternatives are available.
No good free alternative exists. In fact no good proprietary alternative exists, either. There's a very good reason for open standards, and H.264 is just that.
Mozilla? Xiph? The FSF?? Those nice people who gave you a free web browser and a free compiler and oh yeah half of the infrastructure that runs the internet, including probably over 50% of the code that powers your ability to post here...
Mozilla is one of many. Code signed-over to the FSF most certainly doesn't make up a significant portion of the internet, even if they did have anything to do with it. The FSF provides mostly user-land utilities, and there are BSD alternatives for all of those, anyways, so no big deal there.
Who merely have the temerity to suggest lowly users have any control over the computers they use??
H.264 is an open standard. There are no controls attached to it.
They are the problem?
Unquestionably. They are pushing their own favored technology, when better technologies (but "not invented here") are favored by the overwhelming majority of the world. They are using every heavy-handed tactic they can come up with, in a game of brinkmanship. Even Microsoft has never been as blatant about their attempts to push their own technologies on others.
It's only here on/. that the respective demigods get their positions trumpeted without any critical thinking from their supporters, no matter how clearly in the wrong they are.
Only if the punishment for the crime becomes commensurate with the value of the object
It already is. My suggestion was to change that... How you think you can add a contradictory conditional to that is beyond me.
Of course, I'd use the "old west" measure that stealing a horse is a hanging offense and go from there. That would make stealing a car and anything more valuable capital offenses.
Horses were more valuable then than cars are today...
But that aside, I'd be happy to let you live in your little slice of heaven, where every kid going on a joy ride gets executed, and every shoplifter takes out 20 innocent bystanders rather than give themselves up, due to the draconian punishment...
It's only in the right-wind fantasy world that, when the punishment is harsh enough, crimes stop being committed. The opposite is actually quite true. And I'd be damn sure you've made plenty of mistakes in your life, which you've conveniently forgotten about... Sure, YOU deserved a light punishment, but everyone else should be locked-up forever!
If you have an old PIX or old firmware (6.3(2) or older) then you will be affected. And if you do, you should just go ahead and upgrade to an ASA at this point.;)
And then what...? Upgrade the ASA to a 10 year-old PC running OpenBSD to get some decent features, vastly better ease of use, and support? I seem to be missing step 2 here...
For some reason a lot of/. people seem to think that not securing your property suddenly makes it fair game for anyone who wants to take it. The crime occurs when someone takes something that doesn't belong to them regardless of how well or how poorly it is secured.
I WOULD like to see the laws changed so that punishment is relative to the difficulty of the crime, rather than the value of the object. A professional criminal with the tools to disarm the alarm, pick the door locks, etc., shouldn't be equivalent to some stupid kid who saw a car with the keys in the ignition and decided to go on a drunken joy ride in the middle of nowhere...
Yeah, if you leave your jewelry box on the street, and someone steals it, you deserved it...
So the police can "encourage" third parties to obtain evidence illegally, then use that evidence.
Nope. If any kind of encouragement can be shown, whether active or passive, those third parties become agents of the police, and are bound by the same laws.
Now HTML5 will allow Linux to support itself, and be a first-tier web multimedia client. Unacceptable! They will do almost anything to stop it. Patent threats are rule #1 in their anti-competition playbook.
It's the likes of Mozille, Xiph and the FSF that are putting the breaks on HTML5, to the great benefit of Adobe's Flash... Others have offered their support for HTML5 with H.264 video, and without the attempts to frustrate it's use, it would be a widely accepted standard by now. Apple in particular is heavily pushing H.264, in lieu of Flash, which is decidedly a good thing for open source.
H.264 may not be ideal for open source advocates, but it's vastly better than Flash which only BARELY works on Linux, and doesn't work at all on other open source operating systems, or other CPU architectures... The extra hoops to get around patent licenses, like distributing binaries from outside the US, or distributing source code only, are manageable, and have been dealt with just fine for many years with LAME, XMMS, ffmpeg, MPlayer, VLC, Xine, FAAD/FAAC, liba52, MPEG4IP, MP4Box, etc., etc. Sure, it's not ideal, but it's light-years better than the web's current dependence on Flash.
The FSF prefers to be anti-pragmatic, they would rather have things get worse, rather than let a not quite entirely free option get adopted, no matter how unrealistic their alternative is... Xiph are just kids upset their lousy codecs aren't taking over the world... Mozilla, meanwhile, refuses to depend on any other operating system function, and insist on the browser being it's own OS.
Again, I'm not saying nuclear plants are dangerous. I would like to see them built. But at the moment, the "free market" in the form of insurance companies, don't seem to think they are safe enough.
It has nothing to do with how "safe" they are, and everything to do with how large the damages could possibly be if something went catastrophically wrong. There's simply no insurance company out there big enough to even PRETEND they can offer such an insurance policy...
If you immediately try to go renewable 100%, you'll run into the problem that wind is intermittent, the sun doesn't shine at night and solar cells provide less power in bad weather, etc.
Not really... Hydro already provides a major fraction of our electricity (it was more than 33% in CA just a couple years ago), and is ideal for any and all electrical needs.
In short, if we had enough wind turbines and solar panels to provide 100% of the energy that we need, we'd use it whenever possible, and use the hydro to fill in the gaps during poor weather conditions. No wasted energy storage needed. Just don't use the hydro until needed.
Additionally, photovoltaic cells aren't really interesting at a large scale... It's more expensive and less efficient than solar-thermal. Solar thermal also happens to be quite stable across varying weather conditions, with liquefied sodium plants providing full continuous output 24 hours per day, and continuing to provide a significant fraction of that power output for days, even after the sun explodes...
US Coal mining deaths per exajoule electricity produced: 4.5 World wind power deaths per exajoule electricity produced: at least 8.4
Wait... You're comparing ALL deaths associated with wind turbines to only those who died due to the MINING of coal? Or are you suggesting that NOBODY has died in the transportation of that coal, nor during the maintenance of all coal power plants? After all, practically all deaths related to wind turbines are a result of MAINTENANCE...
Just an FYI for anyone out there stuck supporting Windows systems...
Including the disk driver packs seems to have disabled Microsoft's (unsupported, but invaluable) fix for booting with a different IDE controller than was present during the system install: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082
So your need is a video container format only for Windows?
No, Monty is simply lying about this point.
While the fields in Ogm are based on Window's VfW, they can be created and parsed on any platform quite easily. I've NEVER used Ogm one Windows, I've ALWAYS used it under Unix systems. Ogmtools can be used to generate such files, and MPlayer (which works on damn near every platform, from Linux, Windows, and OSX to VMS and OS/2) will play them out of the box, with no additional dependencies.
And in any case, if you use a codec set to use few keyframes, you'll get poor seek performance in *any* container format - it's quite likely the issues you saw had everything to do with the encoding choices made and little with the (deprecated) ogm container.
Not at all. Every other format listed as having good seek performance has an INDEX. Ogg/Ogm does not. Lacking an index generally results in broken frames when seeking as well.
The are a couple efforts to get Ogg files indexed, but Xiph.org remains utterly indifferent, so you can expect it to remain an unsupported bastard step child like OGM, which is also only unofficial because Xiph can't be bothered with other people's needs.
It's extremely inexpensive to ship products, and the high price of hemp paper doesn't include or assume the cost of shipping to the US, it's very expensive even in local prices.
Americans are in no position to complain about friendly fire incidents.
The USS Liberty incident is a pretty clear cut, intentional act. Israel wanted the US on it's side of the war, so it disguised it's fighters, and attacked a vessel that prominently displayed a huge US flag. When they were caught, they tried to claim it was mistaken identity, but nobody believes it. It's as much of an open secret as Israel's nukes.
Rendering a full page is much heavier for the server so in that aspect it's an advantage.
Hardly. Rendering one large page in response to a request, rather than 10 smaller requests, does not really decrease load.
Loading a full page for a client is heavier because there's more to parse.
Except loading a page is handled MUCH differently from dynamic changes to an existing page, such that loading a full page is faster...
Loading a full page takes up more bandwidth so it's worse on your internet connection too.
In most cases, the dynamic content is 90%+ of the page, so the difference is trivial, particularly when combined with compression...
So there are only 2 cases I can think of where it might not be noticably faster. 1. A high-latency connection (which I suppose you have judging from your message). 2. A slow cpu that has trouble with handling all those small parts of data (opposed to 1 big stream).
My connection is quite fast. My CPU is a few years old, but hardly slow by any standards... Of course, browsers that keep getting heavier doesn't help.
I also love the inherent contradictions in your comment... Would you care to explain how "Loading a full page for a client is heavier" yet that is faster for "A slow cpu"? I suspect you've never held your dogma up to scrutiny, and are making it up as you go along...
And this is the reason why you shouldn't use CGI scripts these days - the interface sucks and forking a process for each request is very expensive.
You're suggesting sites which use AJAX heavily have never been slashdotted?
With non-AJAX sites, the pages are smaller without all the javascript, including code for every different bug in every different browser is not only a programming nightmare, but makes for a far less responsive page...
Everyone treats it like a foregone conclusion that AJAX is faster... It may be true if you have something painfully simple like a calculator in the middle of an HTML-massive page, but otherwise, the performance is undeniably worse on any modest PC (never-mind portable/embedded devices!).
GMail's Basic HTML version is certainly faster, though missing a feature here and there due to being a second-class citizen. Google Maps is even worse... Sure, being able to click and drag an online map was neat when it first came out, but faster than clicking an arrow in the corner? Not for me... I'd rather have it move in whole, consistent, step sizes. And faster? Hell no! I sit around waiting several seconds for Google maps to load up, prompt after prompt to "keep waiting" or else any address you type in will get munged. If good old mapquest had stayed HTML, but included aerial photos (satellite/birds-eye), I don't believe Google would have gained any traction there... And don't try to tell me how much worse the responsiveness would be... The displayed images are already cached, the CSS and JS is cached, so only the main page needs to be fetched, along with a couple new map squares. Reloading an HTML page is blazing fast... And not just faster, but better, as my browser doesn't lock up for at least a couple seconds on every action/request.
AJAX has become a trend, an gone far off the rails as to where it's actually a benefit over the oh so "old fashioned" technologies that worked damn well for decades...
And I say this as someone who has written a couple AJAX apps... the "simple calculators" mentioned above. But make no mistake, it would have been only a trivial amount more work to make it a CGI script instead, and nominally slower or more disruptive.
It is the most basic of rights to be able to use what you pay for.
You aren't paying for it, though. You're charged a fee, which very likely doesn't cover the costs of delivery. And it certainly doesn't remotely cover what they would have had to pay for right-of-way access without the government monopoly status...
You see, there are plenty of people out there who need electricity, and CAN'T pay the fair-market value of it. Saying you should be able to do whatever you want with it is simply saying you want to price OTHERS out of the market. Sure, poor people just shouldn't have heating and air conditioning... Those medicare leeches should just suck it up when their power gets cut for non-payment, and their kidney dialysis machine stops working. Sucks to be you. Welcome to the free market, suckers!
Somehow I don't believe for a second you'd be singing the praises of the free market if you were forced to pay for a new electric meter which records peak/off-peak usage, and charges accordingly. And when you found yourself paying 100X as much to power your AC in the afternoon, you'd be clamoring for the power company to cut your AC by 2% to get that bill back down.
And it's certainly not just electricity. Just wait until you run into a drought, and you are no longer allowed to water your lawn... Then again, this same system forces those that live around the lake you're draining to give you water, no matter how much they might want to charge you for their water...
But hey, you can go buy bottled water to do the job, right? And car batteries are only $50 a shot, just connect them to a massive inverter and your AC will churn right along until it comes time to swap the batteries. No monopoly there, that's for sure...
But Obama has yet to return the $994,795 in donations his campaign received from Goldman Sachs and its employees.
So, if you bribe a cop not to give you a speeding ticket, and he decides to give you the ticket anyways, and impound your car as well, he should give you the bribe money back... What? Why?
you need ~200 DPI on the display before you can get away with scaling all the UI elements without them jumping around by 1/2 pixels, etc
That's assuming brain-dead "nearest-neighbor" scaling (only whole-pixel steps). Plenty of other methods perform far better. bicubic is the first one that comes to mind.
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IBM is Goliath. x86 is David. ARM is David's annoying little brother, angry at not being in the spot-light, and insisting he can do everything better than David....
I'm voting for x86. It's the only architecture with two suppliers (no, Via doesn't count), and has continued to advance consistently for decades. It's only very recently that it has pushed mainframes off their pedestal thanks to clustering and virtualization technologies, and only in the past few months has it started making waves at the very high end, with (just a few) RAS features FINALLY being integrated.
ARM is all hype, playing fast and loose with specs to pretend they're competitive anywhere else outside their niche. Frankly, I'd say they have more money than they know what to do with, and are trying longshot after longshot to fight back against x86, as it starts impeding on their market.
Since it comes in a device weighing around 1kg (2.2lbs)...
Sure, carry a car battery around and you'll get days and days of battery-life...
Who says you should be allowed to implement technologies that were UNDENIABLY developed by others, at great expense? H.264 is most certainly not patent troll territory.
Frankly, it's ridiculous that outside of the US, you can implement all the patented technologies you want in your software, UNTIL your software gets flashed into the firmware of a device... THEN you have to pay... That is why complaining about software patents is ridiculous.
If you want to say software patents are too broad, and need to be redefined, that's just fine, but H.264 will undeniably remain as some of the most solidly legitimate patents no matter how far you go, short of abolishing them all together.
It you want to say all patents should be abolished, fine. At least that would be an honest and logically consistent position. However, I think you'll find an overwhelming amount of opposition from people who believe that individuals should be allowed to benefit from non-obvious inventions they come up with, even if they don't have the money to commercialize them personally.
Of course none of this changes anything I've said. H.264 would be a good option for video on the web, only a tiny minority vehemently oppose it for absolutely baseless and irrational reasons, and that tiny minority is thereby the single biggest force propping-up the proprietary Adobe Flash monopoly, which happens to hurt that same tiny minority (and the public at large) vastly more than the patents on H.264 ever could.
No good free alternative exists. In fact no good proprietary alternative exists, either. There's a very good reason for open standards, and H.264 is just that.
Mozilla is one of many. Code signed-over to the FSF most certainly doesn't make up a significant portion of the internet, even if they did have anything to do with it. The FSF provides mostly user-land utilities, and there are BSD alternatives for all of those, anyways, so no big deal there.
H.264 is an open standard. There are no controls attached to it.
Unquestionably. They are pushing their own favored technology, when better technologies (but "not invented here") are favored by the overwhelming majority of the world. They are using every heavy-handed tactic they can come up with, in a game of brinkmanship. Even Microsoft has never been as blatant about their attempts to push their own technologies on others.
It's only here on /. that the respective demigods get their positions trumpeted without any critical thinking from their supporters, no matter how clearly in the wrong they are.
It already is. My suggestion was to change that... How you think you can add a contradictory conditional to that is beyond me.
Horses were more valuable then than cars are today...
But that aside, I'd be happy to let you live in your little slice of heaven, where every kid going on a joy ride gets executed, and every shoplifter takes out 20 innocent bystanders rather than give themselves up, due to the draconian punishment...
It's only in the right-wind fantasy world that, when the punishment is harsh enough, crimes stop being committed. The opposite is actually quite true. And I'd be damn sure you've made plenty of mistakes in your life, which you've conveniently forgotten about... Sure, YOU deserved a light punishment, but everyone else should be locked-up forever!
And then what...? Upgrade the ASA to a 10 year-old PC running OpenBSD to get some decent features, vastly better ease of use, and support? I seem to be missing step 2 here...
I WOULD like to see the laws changed so that punishment is relative to the difficulty of the crime, rather than the value of the object. A professional criminal with the tools to disarm the alarm, pick the door locks, etc., shouldn't be equivalent to some stupid kid who saw a car with the keys in the ignition and decided to go on a drunken joy ride in the middle of nowhere...
Yeah, if you leave your jewelry box on the street, and someone steals it, you deserved it...
Nope. If any kind of encouragement can be shown, whether active or passive, those third parties become agents of the police, and are bound by the same laws.
It's the likes of Mozille, Xiph and the FSF that are putting the breaks on HTML5, to the great benefit of Adobe's Flash... Others have offered their support for HTML5 with H.264 video, and without the attempts to frustrate it's use, it would be a widely accepted standard by now. Apple in particular is heavily pushing H.264, in lieu of Flash, which is decidedly a good thing for open source.
H.264 may not be ideal for open source advocates, but it's vastly better than Flash which only BARELY works on Linux, and doesn't work at all on other open source operating systems, or other CPU architectures... The extra hoops to get around patent licenses, like distributing binaries from outside the US, or distributing source code only, are manageable, and have been dealt with just fine for many years with LAME, XMMS, ffmpeg, MPlayer, VLC, Xine, FAAD/FAAC, liba52, MPEG4IP, MP4Box, etc., etc. Sure, it's not ideal, but it's light-years better than the web's current dependence on Flash.
The FSF prefers to be anti-pragmatic, they would rather have things get worse, rather than let a not quite entirely free option get adopted, no matter how unrealistic their alternative is... Xiph are just kids upset their lousy codecs aren't taking over the world... Mozilla, meanwhile, refuses to depend on any other operating system function, and insist on the browser being it's own OS.
Yes, I clearly have no idea what I'm talking about... Just like all the USS Liberty survivors: http://www.gtr5.com/
Yes, it's always important to go DIRECTLY to the propaganda...
It has nothing to do with how "safe" they are, and everything to do with how large the damages could possibly be if something went catastrophically wrong. There's simply no insurance company out there big enough to even PRETEND they can offer such an insurance policy...
Not really... Hydro already provides a major fraction of our electricity (it was more than 33% in CA just a couple years ago), and is ideal for any and all electrical needs.
In short, if we had enough wind turbines and solar panels to provide 100% of the energy that we need, we'd use it whenever possible, and use the hydro to fill in the gaps during poor weather conditions. No wasted energy storage needed. Just don't use the hydro until needed.
Additionally, photovoltaic cells aren't really interesting at a large scale... It's more expensive and less efficient than solar-thermal. Solar thermal also happens to be quite stable across varying weather conditions, with liquefied sodium plants providing full continuous output 24 hours per day, and continuing to provide a significant fraction of that power output for days, even after the sun explodes...
Wait... You're comparing ALL deaths associated with wind turbines to only those who died due to the MINING of coal? Or are you suggesting that NOBODY has died in the transportation of that coal, nor during the maintenance of all coal power plants? After all, practically all deaths related to wind turbines are a result of MAINTENANCE...
Just an FYI for anyone out there stuck supporting Windows systems...
Including the disk driver packs seems to have disabled Microsoft's (unsupported, but invaluable) fix for booting with a different IDE controller than was present during the system install: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082
No, Monty is simply lying about this point.
While the fields in Ogm are based on Window's VfW, they can be created and parsed on any platform quite easily. I've NEVER used Ogm one Windows, I've ALWAYS used it under Unix systems. Ogmtools can be used to generate such files, and MPlayer (which works on damn near every platform, from Linux, Windows, and OSX to VMS and OS/2) will play them out of the box, with no additional dependencies.
Not at all. Every other format listed as having good seek performance has an INDEX. Ogg/Ogm does not. Lacking an index generally results in broken frames when seeking as well.
The are a couple efforts to get Ogg files indexed, but Xiph.org remains utterly indifferent, so you can expect it to remain an unsupported bastard step child like OGM, which is also only unofficial because Xiph can't be bothered with other people's needs.
It's extremely inexpensive to ship products, and the high price of hemp paper doesn't include or assume the cost of shipping to the US, it's very expensive even in local prices.
The USS Liberty incident is a pretty clear cut, intentional act. Israel wanted the US on it's side of the war, so it disguised it's fighters, and attacked a vessel that prominently displayed a huge US flag. When they were caught, they tried to claim it was mistaken identity, but nobody believes it. It's as much of an open secret as Israel's nukes.
Hardly. Rendering one large page in response to a request, rather than 10 smaller requests, does not really decrease load.
Except loading a page is handled MUCH differently from dynamic changes to an existing page, such that loading a full page is faster...
In most cases, the dynamic content is 90%+ of the page, so the difference is trivial, particularly when combined with compression...
My connection is quite fast. My CPU is a few years old, but hardly slow by any standards... Of course, browsers that keep getting heavier doesn't help.
I also love the inherent contradictions in your comment... Would you care to explain how "Loading a full page for a client is heavier" yet that is faster for "A slow cpu"? I suspect you've never held your dogma up to scrutiny, and are making it up as you go along...
You're suggesting sites which use AJAX heavily have never been slashdotted?
With non-AJAX sites, the pages are smaller without all the javascript, including code for every different bug in every different browser is not only a programming nightmare, but makes for a far less responsive page...
Everyone treats it like a foregone conclusion that AJAX is faster... It may be true if you have something painfully simple like a calculator in the middle of an HTML-massive page, but otherwise, the performance is undeniably worse on any modest PC (never-mind portable/embedded devices!).
GMail's Basic HTML version is certainly faster, though missing a feature here and there due to being a second-class citizen. Google Maps is even worse... Sure, being able to click and drag an online map was neat when it first came out, but faster than clicking an arrow in the corner? Not for me... I'd rather have it move in whole, consistent, step sizes. And faster? Hell no! I sit around waiting several seconds for Google maps to load up, prompt after prompt to "keep waiting" or else any address you type in will get munged. If good old mapquest had stayed HTML, but included aerial photos (satellite/birds-eye), I don't believe Google would have gained any traction there... And don't try to tell me how much worse the responsiveness would be... The displayed images are already cached, the CSS and JS is cached, so only the main page needs to be fetched, along with a couple new map squares. Reloading an HTML page is blazing fast... And not just faster, but better, as my browser doesn't lock up for at least a couple seconds on every action/request.
AJAX has become a trend, an gone far off the rails as to where it's actually a benefit over the oh so "old fashioned" technologies that worked damn well for decades...
And I say this as someone who has written a couple AJAX apps... the "simple calculators" mentioned above. But make no mistake, it would have been only a trivial amount more work to make it a CGI script instead, and nominally slower or more disruptive.
You aren't paying for it, though. You're charged a fee, which very likely doesn't cover the costs of delivery. And it certainly doesn't remotely cover what they would have had to pay for right-of-way access without the government monopoly status...
You see, there are plenty of people out there who need electricity, and CAN'T pay the fair-market value of it. Saying you should be able to do whatever you want with it is simply saying you want to price OTHERS out of the market. Sure, poor people just shouldn't have heating and air conditioning... Those medicare leeches should just suck it up when their power gets cut for non-payment, and their kidney dialysis machine stops working. Sucks to be you. Welcome to the free market, suckers!
Somehow I don't believe for a second you'd be singing the praises of the free market if you were forced to pay for a new electric meter which records peak/off-peak usage, and charges accordingly. And when you found yourself paying 100X as much to power your AC in the afternoon, you'd be clamoring for the power company to cut your AC by 2% to get that bill back down.
And it's certainly not just electricity. Just wait until you run into a drought, and you are no longer allowed to water your lawn... Then again, this same system forces those that live around the lake you're draining to give you water, no matter how much they might want to charge you for their water...
But hey, you can go buy bottled water to do the job, right? And car batteries are only $50 a shot, just connect them to a massive inverter and your AC will churn right along until it comes time to swap the batteries. No monopoly there, that's for sure...
So, if you bribe a cop not to give you a speeding ticket, and he decides to give you the ticket anyways, and impound your car as well, he should give you the bribe money back... What? Why?
That's assuming brain-dead "nearest-neighbor" scaling (only whole-pixel steps). Plenty of other methods perform far better. bicubic is the first one that comes to mind.